A Triumph Of The Common Man
Sunday evening as National Public Radio replayed Norman Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph,” the memories of that boyhood spring, when World War II ended in Europe, came flooding back.
Time was when every word of Corwin’s blank-verse epic, celebrating the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany, had been etched into my mind. Over and over, I had heard the recording of the original broadcast.
Charles Kuralt, a bit younger than I am, said the opening words had become an anthem to him, too: “Take a bow, GI. Take a bow, little guy. The Superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon.”
It was not corny or patronizing back in 1945. It was an elegant way of saying what we all felt back then - even punk kids too young to do any more for the war effort than collect tinfoil and scrap metal and buy war stamps with the coins we had earned for our efforts.
Our war would come a few years later in Korea, though we didn’t know it then, as we followed the battle maps and listened to Edward R. Murrow. In our naivete, it never occurred to us, even right after Pearl Harbor, that the United States might lose the war. It was just a question of when we would win.
The naivete extended to what had been won when the last battle in Berlin ended half a century ago. We thought “a note of triumph” was perfectly appropriate. Nazism was such an evil, and Adolf Hitler was such a villain, that disposing of them was an unqualified good. As Corwin said, “The Rat is dead in the alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse,” and a celebration was in order.
Little did we imagine that within a year, our wartime ally, the Soviet Union, would emerge as a threat to peace and freedom every bit as challenging as the one we had just vanquished. Little did we suspect that the end of World War II would usher in more than four decades of Cold War, the “twilight struggle” that would test our courage and tenacity in new ways.
The low point of that struggle came from 1968 to 1970 when the frustrations of the second anticommunist war, this one in Vietnam, threatened to tear this country apart. Somehow, we surmounted that, caught a second wind and sustained the effort.
Because we did, we now see a genuine liberation of Europe that is more complete and probably more enduring that the one we celebrated in 1945.
Western Europe has prospered in peace, and democracy has reached even into nations such as Spain and Portugal, which did not know it in 1945. But the greatest success stories have been written in vanquished West Germany and Italy, where wise and generous policies by the victors were combined with the moral authority of the postwar Christian Democratic governments to build a civil society capable of nurturing democratic institutions.
In the last five years, that movement for freedom and democracy finally has reached into Eastern Europe, shattering the Soviet Union and liberating the people who had been subjected to communism by the bayonets and tanks of the occupying Soviet armies. It is that triumph that President Clinton is celebrating - as much as the victory over Nazism - on his visit to Moscow this week.
To be sure, serious problems remain in Europe. Ethnic massacres have scarred the face of Yugoslavia and flare up from time to time in Russia as well. Unemployment is higher than it should be in Western Europe, and many of the Eastern European economies - including Russia’s - are struggling to modernize.
But viewed in historical terms, it has been exactly what Corwin said - a triumph.
It was fashioned by an extraordinary set of leaders, among them Harry Truman, George Marshall, Arthur Vandenberg, Dwight Eisenhower, Lucius Clay and the other “wise men” of this country. But it was mainly a victory achieved through the sacrifice of millions of ordinary people, beginning with the men and women who were in uniform and in war plants during the struggle against Hitler.
The vast majority of today’s Americans have no personal memories of World War II. It is important for them to know that the question that consumed politicians and pundits of that time was whether free people in a democracy have the selfdiscipline to prevail against dictatorships and the power they could coerce. It was a legitimate question, given the moral, political and military collapse of the Allies after World War I.
But World War II and the Cold War have answered that question with a ringing affirmative.
That is indeed a triumph - the great triumph of the 20th century.
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